03 August 2003

ARLINGTON- Today is a day of queer anniversaries. In 1948, the pudgy former Communist Whittaker Chambers, publicly accused former State Department official Alger Hiss of having been part of a Communist underground. Hiss vehemently denied right to his death. It wasn't until a half century later, with the disclosure of the existence of the Venona transcripts from NSA, that we were told there was proof. That shot the hell out of a lot of fundraisers held by the usual apologists down through the years. Nobody talks about Alger much anymore, now that he is not a martyr. Julius and Ethyl Rosenburg are still dead, and they are still guilty, though Ethyl probably got more than she had ever signed on for.

On August 3rd, 1914, Germany declared war on France, and the wreckage from that is only now starting to sort itself out. There was a minute earlier this year when it looked like the old Europe was finally gone, but the Italians and the Germans have fixed that misconception with their squabbling over respective national stereotypes. Something about waiters and concentration camp guards, I don't know. In 1987, the Iran-Contra congressional hearings ended, with none of the 29 witnesses tying President Reagan directly to the diversion of arms-sales profits to Nicaraguan rebels. Admiral Poindexter, the National Security Advisor of the time, took the bullet for the President and said he forgot to mention it. He got fired last week from his second Government job, this time for sponsoring a futures market in Middle East politics. Like there was some other way to try to divine the future over there.

Which is how I feel about the burial of Beevis and Butthead, the Hussain boys, in their family plot in Tikrit. I think they should have scattered the ashes along anonymous roads like they did to the Nazi leadership to ensure that there was no rallying point, not ever, world without end, amen.

When you are imposing your will, or trying to, you should remember your history, for reasons of which I do not need to remind you. But no one called from CENTCOM to ask my opinion.

I am still a sailor, for another few days anyway, and I am attracted to the history of life on the sea. On this day in 1958, the nuclear-powered submarine Nautilus became the first vessel to cross the North Pole underwater, and astonishing accomplishment by Americans carrying a nuclear reactor in their back pocket and blasting sound like a bat to avoid the adamant spires of downward pointing ice. That cruise made the ocean blue, even the part covered by ice, open to anyone with several dozen million dollars. With Global Warming we may not have to worry about ice at the pole, but there will be a commensurate requirement for boating in places like lower Manhattan, maybe gondoliers carrying fares on the Avenue of the Americas, and only the tip of Saint Mark's visible in Venice. Which brings us around to the most momentous of the anniversaries in this book of days.

On this day In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, setting out from Puerto, Spain, on a voyage that would take him to the present-day Americas. He didn't make it all the way to North America, not on that or any other trip. But I have walked into his son's office in Santo Domingo. The ancient stone is really not that old in the great scheme of things. Nor is it that far, having replicated that voyage on a great man of war from the southern coast of Spain to the New World. I have visited at least three totally authentic first landing sights in the Caribbean, in the Dominican Republic and the Turks and Cacos Islands. Cuba claims him, too, though it was likely the verdant green island of Hispaniola that he first saw. We now know the bifurcated island as the verdant DomRep and gray impoverished Haiti.

A couple years ago I was flying into Santo Domingo. It was late in the day and the blue sparkliung waters had dimmed to dark. On final approach, I marveled at the monument erected in 1992 to honor the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Italian-Spanish expedition from the Old World. The Faro de Colón, or "Columbus Lighthouse," sits imposingly on the outskirts of the capital by the government of the corrupt sometimes dictator Juan Ballaguer. It is a colossal concrete structure designed as a massive cross. Outlining the structure are powerful searchlights with point straight up, and when turned on are said to drain the power reserves of the capital, plunging the poor into darkness in order to illuminate the heavens. The construction was one of those miscalculation of a myopic government that failed to recognize that the anniversary of the Columbus's arrival was being commemorated a global tragedy. The international criticism of the massive spending required to pay for this structure when millions of the DomRep's people lived in poverty was viewed as another example of the corrupt colonial tradition.

What is left of Columbus the man is either in the cathedral at Santo Domingo, in a box, or somewhere else. He returned after the Spanish chafed at being led by an Italian and conspired against him. Queen Isabella, his great benefactress, was dying when he returned in late 1504. Though still wealthy from his explorations, Columbus felt wronged and believed he should be restored as governor of Hispaniola. A year later, Christopher Columbus became ill, and still convinced he had set foot in Asia rather than a New World. He died in the Castilian city of Valladolid, Spain, on May 20, 1506, at the ripe old age of 54.

The "Discoverer" of America traveled more after his death than he did in life. In his will, he directed his remains to be taken back to Hispaniola. If he could not rule there, at least he would rest there. to the Dominican Republic. He was initially interred in Valladolid, but tarried there only three years. His bones were moved to Seville's Carthusian monastery where he remained for twenty-six years. In 1537, he finally was dispatched for burial in Santo Domingo, along with the body of his legitimate son, Diego. But in 1795, the French took control of the island and the Spaniards moved the box of bones to Havana. In 1898, when Admiral Dewey threw the Spaniards out of Cuba, the remains were taken back to Seville and buried in the Cathedral.

Maybe. In 1877, a box with some bone fragments and the inscription "Illustrious and Enlightened Don Cristobal Colon" was found in the crypt in Santo Domingo's cathedral. According to the Dominicans, in the confusion attending the arrival of Napoleon's soldiers the Spaniards took the wrong box, contained the former Diego, who was buried nearby. They are now in the process of disinterring everyone concerned in the controversy to render the bones for DNA to figure this all out. And thus, some of the family is still traveling.

It is quite a topic for discussion, if you are enjoying a cold Presidente beer in the square near the Alcázar de Colon where Diego lived. The feel of the wind off the blue waters of the harbor cuts the oppressive humidity. The area was a slum for a few hundred years until the strongman Rafael Trujillo had the idea of cleaning it up to recognize the importance of this oldest place in the European New World. He did it in 1955, ripping down shanties and restoring the plaza and the Alcazar to something like the original glory. The nature of that glory was not open to interpretation. Trujillo also decreed that disagreement with the writings of his Academy of History was a criminal offense. From a table on the cobbled plaza you can see where the Dominican snipers were positioned on the silos near the docks during the Maine incursion to protect American interests in 1965.

He was a piece of work, one of a kind with "Pappa Doc" Duvalier across the border, and his is a cautionary tale as we renew our adventure in ordering the world. He had been a clerk in the Telegraph Department when the U.S. Marines ruled Hispaniola in the 1930s. Smedley Butler and his devil dogs occupied Hispaniola to impose order. The Marines ruled the DomRep for eight years, and Haiti for nearly twenty years. Many of the lessons we should have remembered learned for today's Iraq, good and bad,  were learned in the DomRep and then forgotten. Smedley later observed that he had made Hispaniola safe for the United Fruit Company.

The Marines are sort of the ultimate in a law-and-order administration, and the Army ought to take a couple notes. The Marines strengthened the military of the DomRep to preserve order when they left. Essentially they turned it over to Rafael Trujillo, and so long as American interests were respected, that was the end of it. Trujillo remained in power for over 30 years, but toward the end he succeeded in alienating his erstwhile supporters. Perhaps it was the personal fortune of a half-billion dollars he amassed, and the increasingly aberrant regional behavior. He became a threat to order.

The last straw was drawn when he was linked with an abortive assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Romulo Bétancourt. It was a big year for instability in the Caribbean. On May 30, 1961, Trujilo's personal automobile was ambushed on the beach road after a rendezvous with his mistress. The anniversary date of his assassination is today celebrated as a national holiday in the Dominican Republic. After the untimely death, he was succeeded by his vice-president, Joachim Balaguer, who would build the great lighthouse on the beach beside the ocean blue. He did not count on the not having the Academy of History on his side.

I had some time to kill on that particular trip, and access to an embassy car and driver. I had myself driven out there, to stand on the gravel at the widespot off the highway where that season's threat to order was extinguished. There are plastic bags and broken bottles of Presidente beer there. But the view to windward is spectacular, and the water is an incredible blue.

Where Columbus sailed. You can finish the rest yourself.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra